Angel Delgadillo

Angel Delgadillo

Angel Delgadillo's Route 66 Gift Shop is a popular stop on the Mother Road, particularly for European tourists who have read all about the Guardian Angel of Route 66.
Scott Craven/The Republic

Angel Delgadillo

Before a realignment, Route 66 used to run right in front of Angel Delgadillo's childhood home. He points to where he and his siblings would look for oncoming headlight, creating shadows on the side of the house.
Scott Craven/The Republic

Angel Delgadillo

Angel Delgadillo reminisces in front of the Seligman house in which he was born.
Scott Craven/The Republic

SELIGMAN — On a crisp winter day, Angel Delgadillo stood in front of his birth home, describing events that occurred nine decades ago as if they’d happened last night.

Back then, he said, the nondescript slab of asphalt running past the house brought so many cars from so many miles away. When he and his siblings heard the distinctive rattle of an engine, they gathered along the side of the house and waited.

Until their shadows appeared, cast by oncoming headlights.

For fleeting seconds they jumped and twirled, scrambled and chased, watching their shadows collide in a dizzying display.

As the car passed, the children stopped to watch their shadows fly into the darkness.

“We called it shadow dancing,” Delgadillo said, smiling as if he were 9 and not 90. “Oh, it was so amazing.”

It was the beginning of Delgadillo's beautiful friendship with Route 66, a highway that would entwine itself with his path, eventually becoming his legacy.

Over the years, the narrow road between here and there brought Delgadillo unimaginable joy.

Still getting his kicks on Route 66

Angel Delgadillo, 90, speaks about how he had no choice but to dedicate himself to the resurrection of Route 66, which nearly vanished after Interstate 40 opened.
Wochit

These are good times to be Angel Delgadillo.

At 90 years old — "I'm 36 in here," he will say, pointing to his heart — he goes to work almost every day, often riding his bike the few blocks to Angel & Vilma's Route 66 Gift Shop. He spends a few hours inside the store that also bears his wife's name. Route 66 courses by the shop's front door.

He jokes with the staff, as his early morning chores include spreading smiles. He then looks in on his small barbershop tucked inside the shop, a single-chair operation that allows him to continue a profession he's practiced for 70 years.

If no customers are waiting, Delgadillo will greet travelers who have pulled off the highway seeking the Guardian Angel of Route 66, aka Mayor of the Mother Road. He shakes hands and poses for photos, asking them where Route 66 will take them next.

Should someone request a haircut, Delgadillo will lead them into the shop, moving the life-size cutout of himself stationed behind the chair. Once the customer is settled into the chair, he'll unfold a smock with a flick of his wrist and guide it into place as it floats down like a parachute. He then gets to work with scissors and trimmers.

Typically a camera is pointed Delgadillo's way, and soon his image pops up on social media accompanied by text in German or French or Spanish. Most tourists hail from places as far removed from Route 66 as hybrids are from muscle cars.

Yet Delgadillo is well known in Spain and Germany and Italy as the savior of a highway that has long beckoned European travelers seeking the American West of the movies, with its vast skies and endless horizons.

Today a blustery wind blows across the high desert. Delgadillo is bundled warmly when he arrives at the store to meet someone interested in hearing his story.

This is Reporter No. Twelve-Hundred-and-Something, according to family members who have been keeping track of interviews since Route 66 roared back to life after Delgadillo put the pedal to his mettle.

Looking in the rear-view mirror

After inviting the reporter into his shop, Delgadillo takes a seat in his barber chair, just as comfortable in it as he is behind it. He tells his tale again, for the twelve-hundredth-plus time, and it sounds like the first.

There is drama. There is conflict. There is emotion.

And there is a happy ending, or he wouldn’t be telling the tale at all. And certainly not from a cozy barber chair inside a gift shop along a legendary strip of asphalt.

When it’s over, the reporter signs a thick ledger filled with names of print and TV journalists, as well as a few celebrities. His children started it as a legacy, and are surprised at how heavy it’s become.

Delgadillo jokes with employees before heading outside for few photos. An older gentleman excitedly approaches, his hand out.

“Angel, Angel, a moment please,” he says in a thick European accent.

“Of course,” Delgadillo responds, shaking the man’s hand.

“May I get a photo?” he asks, motioning to a group of people who had just arrived in a large white van. “Not long, I promise.”

Delgadillo steps amid this tour group from Hungary. Photos are taken, the Guardian Angel of Route 66 beaming the entire time.

Had it been a summer day, this scene would have played again and again until Delgadillo needed a break, his legs giving out long before that smile.

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Everyone has days they’d rather forget. Delgadillo’s has a time and date.

At 2:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 22, 1978, the world disappeared.

At least in Seligman.

Two and a half hours earlier and 87 miles down the road, roughly 100 people gathered on a patch of smooth new pavement and killed Route 66.

Dignitaries and civic leaders were in Kingman to cut the ribbon on Interstate 40, opening a $94 million stretch of freeway that immediately made Route 66 obsolete.

At least that’s the way Delgadillo came to see it.

“We were getting 9,000 cars a day,” he said. “You had to be so careful crossing the street. If your driveway backed up to the highway, it could take you 10 to 20 minutes to get out.

“And then there was nothing. We were forgotten. Left to die.”

When men armed with pickaxes and shovels built America’s first major highway in the 1920s, their route often was dictated by the terrain. They chose the path of least resistance, so the path between two points was more a meander than a line.

Not so by the time Interstate 40 came along. With explosives and heavy machinery, it plowed through uninvited, fighting the land. Whereas Route 66 followed a delicate 87-mile rainbow arc from Seligman to Kingman, I-40 took just 72 miles, packing four lanes instead of two to speed drivers along.

Route 66: From a lifeline to a noose

Angel Delgadillo retired as a barber 19 years ago at the age of 70. But he still agrees to give the occasional shave or haircut. Here he shaves Mark Kane of Aukland, New Zealand.(Photo: Roger Naylor/Special for The Republic)

It was among the saddest days in Delgadillo’s life, which revolved around Route 66. He grew up next to the road, then attended barber college and finished his apprenticeship in a pair of Route 66 towns (Pasadena, Calif., and Williams, Ariz.).

He returned to his hometown and in 1950 opened a barbershop in the building that held his father’s shop and pool hall. He moved to a new location in 1972, following the realignment of Route 66. For decades he prospered, and by 1978 had three children in college.

But on the day the traffic died, Route 66 turned from lifeline to noose.

“Most people got up and left,” Delgadillo said. “I couldn’t. Not with the kids in college.”

He said his was one of four businesses that stayed. Delgadillo struggled with money as well as the reality of the situation. He couldn’t understand why a group of otherwise well-intentioned leaders could snip Route 66 from the map.

He tried not to take it personally. It was hard to accept that less than a mile to the south, the future sped by at 65 mph.

Delgadillo never blamed those who were in a rush.

“People are creatures of habit,” he said. “Once they’re on a freeway, they’re not interested in detours. Their eyes are straight ahead.”

His business, and others along Route 66, withered along the barren Mother Road. Every customer to his barber shop and pool hall was cherished, every head was pampered.

But it was nothing like the good old days.

It was clear that as the asphalt chipped and crumbled, so did Delgadillo’s financial future, and that of his friends.

There was one thing to do.

“I knew I could not go to where the people were,” he said. “I had to bring them to me.”

The road to salvation was right outside his front door.

'We knew what it was to be forgotten'

Angel Delgadillo becomes far more animated than his cardboard cutout when talking about the comeback of Route 66.(Photo: Scott Craven/The Republic)

Just like the course taken by the builders of Route 66, Delgadillo first followed the path of least resistance.

He wrote to business and community leaders, asking them to designate the road a historic highway. He called them, wondering about the possibility of marketing Route 66 with ad campaigns and historic signs.

No, they said.

Delgadillo cajoled, begged, pleaded.

No, no, no.

“It’s all I heard,” Delgadillo recalled. “Over and over.”

In 1986, the railroad stopped its layover for workers in Seligman. That meant the five or six heads Delgadillo saw each day, and on which he eked out a living, were there one day and gone the next, just like the traffic.

It was time for a more direct path, one that plowed through anything in the way.

On Feb. 18, 1987, Delgadillo called together like-minded business people to formulate a plan. He told them if Route 66 continued to sputter like a broken-down hot rod, so would their livelihoods.

There was still time, but the Mother Road’s tank was running low.

“We knew what it was to be forgotten,” Delgadillo said. “To be considered useless.”

Of the 15 people who met at the Copper Cart Restaurant in Seligman, Delgadillo said five agreed to join him. They included Delgadillo’s brother Juan, who ran the Snow Cap Drive In. Together they formed the Route 66 Association of Arizona, with Angel Delgadillo as president.

'Route 66 wasn't dead after all'

Angel Delgadillo rides to his gift shop, which is just two blocks from his home.(Photo: Scott Craven/The Republic)

Armed with renewed purpose as well as letterhead, the group implored everyone who would listen, from politicians to members of chambers of commerce. They made calls and wrote letters and arranged meetings.

Delgadillo even started selling Route 66 souvenirs in his barber shop and pool hall, hoping branded merchandise would fuel nostalgia.

In November 1987, the state Transportation Board added Route 66 to Arizona’s list of historic roads. The designation not only breathed new life into the Mother Road, but into a vindicated Delgadillo as well.

“All that time, almost 10 years, we’d been ignored,” he said. “But not anymore. Route 66 wasn’t dead after all.

On April 23, 1988, another group of people gathered on a Seligman roadway to celebrate. Dignitaries spoke, music played and at 10 a.m. a ribbon was cut to christen the “new” Historic Route 66. More than 150 vintage cars and hot rods motored to Kingman, an event so popular that it sparked an annual event, the Fun Run.

That day and over the next several weeks, Delgadillo said, he was interviewed by reporters from all over the world. He was stunned how a ribbon of asphalt could attract so much attention.

For years he thought it was Route 66 itself, a road that tapped into a collective consciousness of cars and adventure and freedom.

But the road only played a small role, he realized later.

“It took years for it to sink in, to understand what really happened back then,” Delgadillo said in a slow, measured tone. “It was that we, the people, succeeded in saving a little bit of America.

“I wasn’t a politician or brilliant history professor or high-powered lawyer. It was the people doing for themselves. The American dream is well here, and still is.”

'I have people come from all over'

Long before Angel Delgadillo saved Route 66, paving the world’s way to Seligman’s doorstep, he was Dad.

The man now sought by international tourists for photos, if not a haircut, was a simple family man with a small, but every bit as adoring, fan base.

This is the man Clarissa Delgadillo still pictures when she sees people who have traveled thousands of miles to seek out her father.

As head of Angel and Vilma Delgadillo’s Route 66 Gift Shop, Clarissa sits in the wings as her father is thrust into the spotlight. She’s seen people tear up in front of him, telling Angel that driving Route 66 and meeting him was on their bucket lists. Her father, stubbornly modest with every handshake and photo, asks them where they are from, thanking them for taking the journey.

When Clarissa thinks of the journey her father has taken, she’s as surprised as he is by the attention.

As the youngest of four children, her earliest memories are of the man who sent his kids off to school with encouraging words and a hug.

In a working-class town filled with men doing all they could to put food on the table, Clarissa said her dad was always there for them, not hesitating to employ a firm hand if one was needed.

“He always believed our teachers,” Clarissa said. “If they said we did something, that was the end of it. No arguments.”

But the struggle to survive brought out the best in her father. She remembered how hard he worked to put her three older siblings through college even as Route 66 went dark. Somehow, she said, he made it work, bringing in just $11,000 a year.

Her dad was even more tenacious as he fought for nearly a decade to bring Route 66 back to life. She watched him hit one dead end after another, pausing only long enough to find another avenue.

“People would say, ‘You’re just a barber, there’s nothing you can do,’ ” Clarissa recalled.

Now that barber is the face of Route 66, at times a burden too heavy for the shoulders of a 90-year-old. Clarissa said her father comes into the shop for a few hours almost every day, puttering around the store when not greeting customers.

She’s told him to stay home, relax, as her mom, Vilma, has done. Vilma, who turns 87 in March, ran the shop with her husband from 1988 and retired in 2006 when Clarissa and her husband moved to Seligman to take over.

Angel Delgadillo will have nothing to do with the three Rs of aging — rest, relaxation and retirement. He'd rather climb onto his bike for the two-block ride, lean it against the side of the store and walk inside, past the cutout of himself by the front door.

And then break out that patented Angel grin for tourists hoping to see him.

“What doctor can write you a prescription that will make you happy?” he said. “Not a single doctor in the world. I have people come from all over, smiling ear to ear, so happy to see you. That’s my joy. I get to have that everyday.”

As her father shakes every hand and poses for every photo, Clarissa smiles too, knowing how lucky she is to be the youngest daughter of the Guardian Angel of Route 66.

Route 66, always and forever home

Tourists from Hungary pose with Angel Delgadillo, whom they know as the Guardian Angel of Route 66. The highway attracts thousands of foreign visitors each year.(Photo: Scott Craven/The Republic)

Since he came back to Seligman after his apprenticeship, the number of times Angel Delgadillo has traveled far off Route 66 is less than the sum of the highway’s digits.

There is no reason to travel the world, he said, when the world travels Route 66.

Fame has found him in spite of his homebody ways. He’s been featured in hundreds of newspapers, magazines and travel blogs. In 2006, he appeared in a Chevy Super Bowl commercial as the Guardian Angel of Route 66.

His most notable achievement, notoriety-wise, may well be an interview he did for Pixar’s 2006 film “Cars,” inspired by the near-death and revival of Route 66.

In the interview, found among the DVD extras of the animated movie, Delgadillo talks about why he fought so long and hard for a desolate stretch of highway.

But Delgadillo has never been to the California Adventure theme park to see Cars Land. He has no intention of visiting Radiator Springs, a Route 66 town inspired by Seligman and crafted by Disney Imagineers.

Why bother when he can look out his front door and see the real thing?